Appearance and language

Reached by the Settings row at the bottom of the screen before a match, or from the Settings row of the match menu.

Themes

Settings → Theme opens the list; the row names whichever one is on.

Ten of them: five dark and five light, listed dark first. The dark ones — Midnight, Deep water, Pine, Claret, Court — are near-black, which is both the most legible outdoors and the cheapest to light on an OLED screen. The light ones — Daylight, Meadow, Sky, Orchid, Blossom — are there for LCD watches and for anyone who simply prefers them; they use more battery, and Battery Saver dims them on its own.

A theme changes colour only. It never changes where anything is, how big the score is, or which half of the screen scores for whom.

A theme changes colours and type only. It cannot change what sits where or how big anything is: the score stays the largest element in every theme, and the server dot always sits above the serving side.

No theme can be made unreadable. Every theme is checked when it loads and one without enough contrast is refused. Downloadable theme packs are coming later, and they go through exactly the same check.

Mix your own

At the end of the theme list there is Mix your own: three sliders — colour, background, text — and the screen itself changes as you drag them, so what you are looking at is what you will get. Use this saves it and puts it on straight away.

The sliders stop before the point where the text would stop being readable in sunlight. That is not the app being fussy: you are choosing indoors, sitting still, and the screen that has to work is outdoors, mid-point, at arm's length — the difference is invisible in the room where you pick. So everything you can reach is something you can read on court.

You get one mixed palette; mixing again replaces it.

Sport

The app knows 24 sports and can score ten of them. It asks which one every time it opens — that is the first screen — and the Sport row here says which one is set and opens the same picker.

Ask at launch, the switch under that row, is what stops it asking. On is the default, and off is the answer of somebody who plays one sport: the app then opens straight on the warm-up screen and uses whatever the Sport row says. There is no separate "default sport" to set, because that is what the row already is.

Why a question rather than only a setting: the sport decides what the screen offers and what the watch measures, and the moment you find out it was wrong is on court, in front of a screen with no match to start. One turn of the bezel at the start costs less than that.

The choice does more than shape the screen: it is stored with everything you record, so your history lists sessions by the name of the sport. It changes nothing about sessions recorded earlier.

For the ten sports it scores — tennis, padel, table tennis, badminton, squash, pickleball, volleyball, football, handball and basketball — the warm-up screen carries Start match, the format and the first server. For every other sport those are not there — not greyed out, absent: a runner has no match to start, and a row that can never do anything only suggests you did something wrong. Start training becomes the screen's main button instead.

The same holds for the settings themselves: on an unscored sport, Score order, Always your side and Score screen are gone — all three are about how you read the score, and a walk has none. The court-time warning stays, because it is about the booking rather than the score: the court is booked for a training session too, and it has to be given back just the same.

The choice decides not only what the app offers but what it measures. The watch offers data by sport: running, walking, hiking and golf add steps and distance, cycling, swimming, skiing and horse riding add distance, the rest give heart rate and calories. So the setting is not cosmetic — a run recorded as tennis produces no distance.

The picker shows one sport at a time, large: its pictogram with its name underneath. Above and below it sits the next one, small, faded and cut off by the edge of the screen — that is what tells you it scrolls. The bezel and your finger both move it, and it always settles on the nearest sport rather than halfway between two.

The order never changes; the starting point does: the picker opens on the sport that is already set. What you need is under your thumb, and every other sport keeps its place for good — after two uses you will know how many clicks away golf is.

Tap the middle one to choose it. Tapping a neighbour does not choose it: it brings itself to the middle instead, because a 20dp icon is too small to be trusted with a decision.

Choosing at launch goes forward, and one gesture back returns to the picker. That is the fix for a sport chosen in a hurry. Opened from here instead, choosing closes the picker and brings you back to these settings.

Language

The app comes in 24 languages — every European one, plus Turkish — and picks one on its own: whatever your watch is set to, or English if your watch is set to a language this app does not have. The full list is in the picker; it is not spelled out here, because twenty-four names in a paragraph is not a list, it is noise.

To choose a different one: Settings → Language, the row with the globe beside it. That icon is not decoration: this is the only setting that can make the app unreadable, and it is the one you then have to find while it is unreadable. The way back stays recognisable at every step — the gear on the warm-up screen, the globe here, then your own language under its own name. The row names the language that is on now, and opens a list of its own — the list has a screen to itself because it grows every time the app learns a language, and one setting worth twenty rows would bury everything under it.

The first entry, Watch language, is the default and means "follow the watch". The rest are in alphabetical order and name themselves — Deutsch, not German. That is deliberate: a language picker is used by somebody who cannot read the screen it is on, so yours has to be findable as a word you recognise.

It changes at once. There is nothing to restart, and you can change it in the middle of a match.

A club account does not change it. If you connect a Joinovo account, the app keeps the language you set here, and setting one here changes nothing on the Joinovo website. The two are separate on purpose: this app has its own set of languages and your club's website may have others, and you may well want a different one on a wrist than in a browser.

Updates

The app can tell you when a newer version has been published, and the first time you open it, it asks whether it may. That question exists because Courtovo otherwise sends nothing at all without a club account, and checking means asking our website — so it is your decision rather than a default.

• Yes, check automatically. On each launch the app asks courtovo.com which version is newest. If you are behind, an Update available row appears on the warm-up screen. It sends no account, no name and nothing about your matches.
• No, I will check myself. Nothing is sent. The check is still there whenever you want it: Settings → Updates → Check now.

Either answer can be changed later, in both directions, under Settings → Updates.

Tapping the update row opens the Play Store, and the Play Store installs it. The app never downloads or installs anything itself — that is not something a watch app is allowed to do, and it is not something you should trust one that asks for it.

You do not have to do any of this. With automatic updates switched on in the Play Store, which is how a watch comes set up, updates arrive on their own while the watch is charging on Wi-Fi. The check here only tells you sooner.

Not yet: the app cannot tell you what changed in a new version, and there is no release-notes screen.

About

The last row of Settings. It carries the app's name, the version you are running — useful when something is wrong and you are describing it to somebody — and the address of the app's own site.

It also has one paragraph about Joinovo, the club system this app can connect to. Connecting a club account fills in your opponent from the day's bookings and keeps finished matches on your member profile. Whether your club uses Joinovo is your club's decision, not something this app can turn on: joinovo.app says what it is.

Nothing here is required. Every format, every point, the history, the statistics and the measurement work with no account and no network, and will keep doing so.